Getting off the ropes

Rope-a-dope was the boxing tactic used by Muhammad Ali in the Rumble in the Jungle, the famous world title fight with George Foreman in Zaire in 1974. Ali won by staying on the ropes in a defensive stance and letting Foreman hit him. Foreman wore himself out and Ali knocked him out in Round 8.

Over the last few years whoever is housing minister has played Ali, while Labour conference delegates are Foreman. They get the minister on the ropes, hit them again and again during the debate and pass a resolution demanding the fourth option. Then they get ignored, get palmed off with the vague offer of a working group and lose the fight. 

Last year the leadership avoided defeat -  by changing the rules to abolish votes on controversial resolutions - and party policy slowly began to move towards the fourth option. In August housing minister Caroline Flint promised a ‘level playing field’ for investment and that councils would be able to bid for social housing grant to build homes from next year. And the review of council housing finance continues.

The lobby group Defend Council Housing [download its conference briefing here] has welcomed the move on social housing grant as ‘a real step forward’. But it remains suspicious that initiatives such as the creation of local housing companies and breaking up the housing revenue account could re-open the door to what it criticises as privatisation.

In normal times, the stage might be set for some modest moves to level the playing field on investment in the existing stock for councils that still have it and limited new freedoms for local authorities to build again. 

But these are not normal times. As the crisis in the financial and housing markets deepens, one by one the old market orthodoxies have come crashing down. The government’s target of 3m homes by 2020 looks further away than ever. As the Lib Dems mooted last week, might one solution be an expansion of local authority borrowing - or even a reform of the rules that restrict that borrowing? 

If ministers can get off the ropes for long enough and take a look around, they might just see that the fourth option for council housing could be about an awful lot more than avoiding another beating at the party conference.